Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday October 27, 2012 @03:54PM
from the added-an-extra-zero dept.

alphadogg writes "The $100 million price differential between the Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco proposals to refresh California State University's 23-campus network revealed earlier this week was based on an identical number of switches and routers in various configurations. CSU allowed Network World to review spreadsheets calculating the eight-year total cost of ownership of each of the five bidders for the project. 'Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet,' said CSU's director of cyberinfrastructure. 'Alcatel-Lucent won the project with a bid of $22 million. Cisco was the high bidder with a cost just under $123 million. Not only was Cisco's bid more than five-and-a-half times that of Alcatel-Lucent's, it was three times that of the next highest bidder: HP, at $41 million.'"

I have always felt that Cisco had the same sort of following as Novell. Senior IT people certified up the wazoo yet unable to explain to me why Cisco was so much better. The bits that leak out of big data people like Facebook and Google seem pretty lacking in the big names. I don't see gear from HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, etc. What I do see is white boxish or custom gear that they seem perfectly happy with.

Just a guess but my bet is that much of the business that big old companies like Cisco come from single skill IT people combined with kick ass sales people. Salespeople who sell to upper management not to the non Cisco IT people who might fact check.

Sometimes a company will place a extremely high bed because they really do not want the contract.
But they have to bid to stay on the list for future proposals.
And if they do get the bid all they have to do is sub it out to a lower bidder and keep the carry.

Is that true for most public entities, and this one in particular? The state of Alaska, on highway projects for example, simply publishes bids for any comer. There is no list of qualified bidders, though for design work, you need an appropriate person with an Alaska PE. Here's [adn.com] an advertisement for airport facilities in Northway, AK, if you're interested. (The preceding link probably broke sometime after 15 November, 2012, if you're reading this later.)

Sometimes a company will place a extremely high bed because they really do not want the contract.But they have to bid to stay on the list for future proposals.And if they do get the bid all they have to do is sub it out to a lower bidder and keep the carry.

This is known as a TTFO quote, as in "told to f*** off". It is technically a quote, but you don't expect to win. Rather you look to send a signal that you don't want this piece of business but if someone INSISTS on throwing it your way, you'll do it at your stupidly inflated rate.

This is very often done by finance companies so they can say with a straight face that they offer financing to EVERYONE.

Facebook & Google have networks/systems designed to work around failure and data loss is a minor inconvenience. They expect to lose a data centre at various times and continue to Just Work. In those environments, cheap grey boxes are fine provided you design appropriately. If you are designing a critical 24x7 system which cannot spread around in the same way (e.g. financial institutions) may have different requirements.

Now, while I'm not saying that Alcatel is less reliable than Cisco, Cisco generally

There are some advantages to going "All Cisco", similar to the advantages of going "All Microsoft" or whatever:

- Huge pool of highly trained talent to pick from. Cisco certified people are easy to get, at both the low end and the high end.- Good consistency in their products. Excluding their most exotic stuff and the cheapest consumer stuff, pretty much everything Cisco makes uses IOS or is IOS compatible to a degree that you can't tell the difference. You learn it once, and that's it, you know all their products.- Complete product line. You can start with an entry level firewall and router, and upgrade to multi-terabit telco grade routers without ever having to throw out your knowledge or tools and start over. If it's a digital cable that you can plug into a router, Cisco almost certainly sells a module for it. If they don't, someone sells a compatible one.

From what I've seen, their competitors try to undercut them on price, often successfully, but then the IT department needs two or three vendors to meet all their networking needs. For example, Cisco sells blade-chassis IO modules (integrated switches), and even VMware vSphere "virtual switches"! If you have VMware on HP Blades (very common), then you either go Cisco, or live with the inconsistency. A lot of vendors will sell switches and routers, but not firewalls, VPN concentrators, WAN accelerators, or something. Suddenly, you need IT guys trained ina bunch of vendors' network equipment, you need three different management and monitoring tools, and your op-ex is through the roof. When you call support with a problem, the vendors will all point at each other, and meanwhile your links are down and your users are screaming at you.

On the other hand, $100M seems a bit much, even for Cisco. Sounds like they put a half-assed effort into the bid, and didn't pick the most cost-effective devices or just didn't give the right educational discount or something.

Facebook and Google seem pretty lacking in the big names

They're special, and aren't even remotely representative of a typical business. The way they build infrastructure has more in common with supercomputer design than business data centre design. For example, Google was using 100 Mbit switches when everyone else was starting the upgrade to 10 Gbit!

Was that a typo? The 100 Mbit switches when everyone was starting to upgrade to 10 Gbit? I would have expected Google to be using 100 Gb when everyone else was starting to upgrade... if it wasn't a typo, could you explain why?

It's not a typo. Google's entire data model is designed around "cheap and disposable" instead of "expensive and bleeding-edge." The general notion is that they can get 10 custom-built consumer-grade systems for the same price as one enterprise-grade server, and have more processing power and better uptime by distributing their workloads to avoid single points of failure.

That's why they use consumer-grade SATA hard drives. If one breaks, they let it sit there until their next walk-through. Meanwhile, the load is distributed onto a bunch of other similarly-inexpensive servers. You'd be surprised how long an el-cheapo hard drive can last when it never stops spinning.

I have a feeling if Google deployed 10GbE to each server, they'd probably double their hardware costs.

Right. But you forgot to mention that they have developed on their own and implemented a very custom software stack.

Not every enterprise out there has the development staff that google does to create such a software layer to be able to commoditize the hardware layers.

Take any established company. Kaiser Medical, Caterpillar, JPMC... while they may have solid IT staffs, the company's core competency is not IT. It's Healthcare, Industrial Machinery or Financial Services. So for them paying for EMC storage or IBM mainframes or Cisco routers and switches is worth their time and money. So they can focus on their core business.

Do you have any evidence to back up the "100mb in the datacenter" statement?(not all statements are directed at revotron; some are just directed at weird comments elsewhere)

1) they make (some) of their own network gear, and have since at least 2007 [1]2) when they buy name-brand, they appear to use force10 [2]3) IOS isn't used in any "modern" cisco gear. They use nx-os, which is derived from their SAN gear and really not much like IOS. [3]4) let's suppose that google doesn't use 10gb in their DC -- why on

There are some advantages to going "All Cisco", similar to the advantages of going "All Microsoft" or whatever:

- Huge pool of highly trained talent to pick from. Cisco certified people are easy to get, at both the low end and the high end.- Good consistency in their products. Excluding their most exotic stuff and the cheapest consumer stuff, pretty much everything Cisco makes uses IOS or is IOS compatible to a degree that you can't tell the difference. You learn it once, and that's it, you know all their pr

I'm going to get pounded for this post, but that's OK - this is a subject with which I am familiar, and I'd like to share my perspective nonetheless.

I have always felt that Cisco had the same sort of following as Novell. Senior IT people certified up the wazoo yet unable to explain to me why Cisco was so much better.

Your current "+5 Insightful" upmods notwithstanding, the fact that you need someone else to explain this to you tells me that, by your own admission, you don't have the knowledge required to make these decisions yourself. That alone makes me wonder why your post got upmodded... but, this is Slashdot in the 21st century, so what can you do, right?

If you had the requisite knowledge, I imagine that you'd be posting from that viewpoint, e.g. "I evaluated Cisco's offerings for my company, and after comparing them to other vendors, decided that they weren't worth the premium price for us." Or something similar, rather than stating: "I have always felt that"... this isn't something subject to feelings. IT/MIS is a technical profession, and cost/benefit analysis with regards to network and computer infrastructure is something that is done every day in the real world, though apparently not by you.

The bits that leak out of big data people like Facebook and Google seem pretty lacking in the big names. I don't see gear from HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, etc. What I do see is white boxish or custom gear that they seem perfectly happy with.

What you don't appear to understand is that Googles and the Facebooks of the world are basically large enough to be OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) in their own right, and have the money and technical resources to pursue that path, and so your attempt to apply their approach to this particular case is flawed. Certainly CSU is large, but they aren't "Google large", when it comes to network infrastructure and servers, and you'll note that they went with a name-brand vendor, rather than rolling their own solution, which makes your statement doubly inane.

Just a guess

You appear to be good at that.

but my bet

What bet? How much? What are the terms? I'm sorry to sound confrontational, but you do realize that such is a null statement? It costs you nothing to say, and there's no penalty if you're wrong. Why not replace it with something more honest, such as "I think that", or, better, in your case: "I believe that"?

much of the business that big old companies like Cisco come from single skill IT people combined with kick ass sales people.

Actually, much of Cisco's success, and sales, come from corporations with mission-critical networks, regardless of scale. They pay a premium for Cisco's hardware, and pay for SmartNet contracts, to ensure their network operations. This may not be worth it to you, but, I have to tell you, their support and logistics when it comes to SmartNet are amazing, and "4 hour parts on site"? The last time I opened a Cisco TAC case for a device so covered, I had a callback in 10 minutes from the person assigned to the case, parts dispatch was under an hour, and the longest delay was on our side: The person that was on-call to open the office (It was a Sunday) didn't answer her cell on the first try, and I left a message with the engineer's cell number, and called him back and gave him her number so he could call her directly to arrange to meet at the office. Once he got onsite, I emailed the backup copy of the router config to him, and he took care of the rest.

Total time was just over three hours, and the following Monday morning everyone came to work and the network was working.

THAT, in my opinion, is worth paying for, when needed, as it was in this case: That office is in Washington State and I'm in New York State.

the big guys spec out their products and use an oem provider and cut out the "middleman", in this case Cisco. Some of the same stuff from the "white boxish" stuff is made on the same lines as Cisco, et al. This is coming much more popular among the large data center corps.

Unless you're talking about Cisco consumer gear (i.e. Linksys).... which isn't really "Cisco", I'm having a hard time believing that the same technology Cisco is putting into a 6509 switch is also sold as a whitebox unbranded switch.

This. A disparity this size suggests there is more to the story. Cisco is expensive, yes, but Lucent isn't free. Hard to see how they intend to make money on the project.

What Cisco brings to the table is their support organization. If you spend as much time with networking as I do, responsible for upwards of fifty switches, multiple firewalls, IPS, wireless, etc., you learn to appreciate being able to open a case and get a knowledgeable person on the line inside of 15 minutes, and replacement hardware next day without jumping through hoops.

I've tried HP and Dell network hardware at various times, and came away unimpressed. Servers sure, but they should stick with that IMO. Haven't dealt with any Lucent gear since 2000 (some modem aggregator IIRC), so can't speak to them directly.

There's a big difference between being cheaper and being a fraction of the price. Maybe it means that you are getting screwed by the expensive vendor, but it can mean you are getting screwed by the cheap one instead.

There are big, big differences in the quality of supposedly "high end" network gear. Some of it is crap. It can't handle the big loads it is supposedly designed for, its software is buggy, hardware prone to failure, support sucks, etc.

Wondering, was the offer directly from Cisco? Did the person who designed/selected the gear know what they were doing?Just by selecting the wrong gear, prices between different Cisco gear can already differ by a factor of 2-3... e.g., we just had a project in which a company campus with something like 20 Gigabit switches (24/48 ports, access layer) and a core with 10G ability to feed to those as well as cover the DC with redundant 1G ports... going with the usual suspect (6500) as core switch with line cards to supply up to 16 10G ports and 96 1G copper ports would have been more than twice the price than the alternative we chose, Nexus 5548 w/ two 2248 FEX chassis.Also, instead of using overpriced (to say the least) Cisco SFP/SFP+ modules would have run the total bill up even more... (total of 44 SFP+, 42 SFP, with original Cisco SFPs that would add up to around 50k€ - would have been a third of the whole project budget. Using OEM/compatible modules was around 5k€). Assuming a large quantity of fiber ports in such a project, the optics alone may quickly add up to the factor mentioned above...

I'm surprised at the price disparity. It's not like Alcatel-Lucent is a cut-rate supplier.

My employer recently bid construction of a project I designed, and all of the bids were within 50% of the low bidder. When I was working as a consultant, I recall losing to the low bidder by 100s on a project worth $80,000. Do others see a price spread as wide as this one?

I'm partial to HP gear, and I always claimed that it has quite decent TCO even in very small scale deployments (we have 5k worth of gear, not 40M). People who buy Cisco must be getting a lot of free pussy or something.

I'm partial to HP gear, and I always claimed that it has quite decent TCO even in very small scale deployments (we have 5k worth of gear, not 40M). People who buy Cisco must be getting a lot of free pussy or something.

Yes, in a small deployment, HP is very cost effective and works well. Even Netgear works well if your budget is $5K.

But in my experience, Cisco does win in manageability and scalability of larger networks. And if things stop working, you can get a knowledgable engineer on the line quickly. We're a pretty small customer (~200 switches), and when we ran into a weird problem with some switches in our environment caused by an IOS bug, we got a custom patch for the problem, which Cisco rolled into the next IOS r

My experience with HP Procurve gear is that it does exactly what it says it does in the spec sheets. The software is rarely buggy, at least not uselessly so, and the hardware is very reliable -- and if it does have problems, they tend to show up from the start, not a year later. The challenge is that there are so few features. I haven't tried the 3com stuff that HP bought yet; back when it was 3com it was quite lousy.

To price itself out of the market. I recall when I worked at the RI Sec of State's office we did a major move of several units within the department to a new space in a different building. I had to go out and spec pricing for switches, routers, and security gear.
For basic core networking I looked at Cisco and HP. For the features I required, namely easy management, VLAN, etc. both offered it but the Cisco gear was 3 times the price of the HP.
Cisco essentially thinks that because it is the predominant vendor for networking hardware that they can charge a heavy premium. They have also bought up competitors whenever they could to limit the market.

Reading the article it's easy to see that there was a huge discrepancy in capabilities, at least to anyone familiar with the various product lines. Cisco proposed a very high end solution, for instance offering up their Nexus solution for the data centers. Alcatel-Lucent simply doesn't have anything similar, although they could build a fine data center solution with slightly less bells and whistles. HP, well, they make some great switching devices, but their L3 routing capabilities are woefully short of both Cisco and Alcatel-Lucents. In fact, that's my biggest clue something went wrong here, if an HP solution is being compared to Nexus, well, that's about as far on opposite ends of the networking spectrum as you can get.

These bids were not at all for the same thing, which tells me the university did a very bad job of writing the RFP. If you put out an RFP saying "I need a car that can take 2 people 100 miles" that spec can be met by a Lamborghini Aventador and a Nissan Versa. The reality is probably neither are appropriate for someone who wants a good value, middle of the road solution.

I have no doubt Cisco could offer up a solution with the same capabilities as Alcatel-Lucent or HP for a competitive price, and no one knows why they didn't do that here. Also, even with similar hardware capabilities speced Cisco software has a lot of features the other vendors simply do not have. Are they worth millions extra? Probably not, but they are worth some extra. If the university had competent people writing the RFP they could have pointed to features that reduce manpower needs and gotten more appropriately priced equipment.

Having written and reviewed a number of RFP's, one of our criteria was the spread on the responses. When it is this large something has likely gone wrong with the RFP process, and it needs to be rebid with better specifications. Back to my car example you can throw in things like it needs to run on regular gas (no more Aventador, or other high end cars), or that it needs to have at least 15 cubic feet of trunk space (no more Versa), and put yourself in a much more reasonable range.

Rather than picking the low bid here the university needs to take a serious look at their requirements, and put out a revised RFP.

I'm not sure that was a real quote from Cisco. It looks to me like they simply didn't want the business. In such cases, business file what are called f-you quotes, which are outrageously priced to take into account that the bidder may not currently have the capability to fill the contract, or that it would be defocusing. Priced high enough, they could sub-contract to HP, for example, and still make a lot of money.

That said, I went to our local office the other day and poked my head into the networking closet. I see the same cheap crummy wifi routers I put there before our little company got bought. Right next to them is a Cisco router worth maybe $10-20K. It's worth more than all the computers and related hardware in the office combined.

But you have to understand that there is a quality difference, and a quite substantial one at that. Cisco's gear, while far from perfect, is massively better than any Alcatell-Lucent stuff. Alcatell-Lucent makes one-off routers. They make it, they ship it, they never look at it again. So if you find your bgp crashes every 2 days... that just becomes a fact of life (I actually replaced bgp peering on an alcatell with a firewall rule redirecting any bgp sessions to a quagga daemon running on linux, which the

It's very possible. If you read the RFPs for some government things, you'll find things that almost no vendor can possibly adhere to. If you are a top tier vendor like Cisco, you likely CAN meet the requirements, but not cheaply. So instead of trying to compete on price, you compete on being able to fulfill all of the requirements in the RFP. You take the gamble that the people analyzing the proposals will nix the cheaper ones as non-compliant, and you are the only bidder left. Or, that the agency will cancel the RFP and rewrite a new one with different or clarified requirements. Then everyone rebids with full knowledge of each others' pricing, and hopes for the best.

I have to completely agree with this. I've been involved with several large-scale RFPs, and this is exactly how it goes. The only thing I'd add is that like clockwork, any party that doesn't win threatens to sue someone. It happens every time. They must be teaching this in business school or something. I've never seen a more childish group of people.

A similar situation also happens (although I have no idea if it happened in this case).

The "preferred" vendor "assists" in writing the RFP. They get it written so they can fulfill it economically while competitors can't. Sometimes this is done by specing features missing from competitor's product or insuring competitors have to spec higher end products to pick up one "required" feature that the "assisting" vendor just happens to include in a lower priced model.

It's very possible. If you read the RFPs for some government things, you'll find things that almost no vendor can possibly adhere to. If you are a top tier vendor like Cisco, you likely CAN meet the requirements, but not cheaply. So instead of trying to compete on price, you compete on being able to fulfill all of the requirements in the RFP. You take the gamble that the people analyzing the proposals will nix the cheaper ones as non-compliant, and you are the only bidder left.

Or you bullshit the RFP. Company I may or may not work for may or may not have just landed a Really Big Deal (TM) RFP for a project. The RFP bid we submitted says we're good to go on everything the agency wanted to do and for less than anyone else. It's a LOT of work. I am sure we underbid.

That's fine and all except we can't deliver some of what was in the RFP. Some of it is stuff we could do but don't currently. It'll require some custom software -which is damn near against the law where I work. Eve

I'm not sure that was a real quote from Cisco. It looks to me like they simply didn't want the business.

Not really, looking at the spreadsheets, it's typical pricing for Cisco. Especially once they started quoting Nexus-backed infrastructure with OTV to stretch layer-2. You'd be surprised at how many people have been biting off on massive OTV and Nexus costs with no competitive analysis. Looks like Cal State just did an objective analysis without marketing hype, and kudos to them.

When we had an RFP for new network equipment Cisco's proposal was twice the price of the next bid. In the end Juniper won the contract. Of all the proposals only the party offering Avaya/Nortel made a judgement error and ignored a few requirements which they could have fulfilled with a bit more expensive kit and still come out as the winner. The requirements were pretty high but not impossible. We had proposals with kit from Cisco, Avaya/Nortel, H3C, Juniper and Alcatel.

That's a fact. It moves data in a highly standardized way. Sure, there are some proprietary Cisco protocols here and there, but for the most part, it's all the same everywhere. Whatever Cisco does, anyone can do.

People somehow believe there's magic moving data over wires. There just isn't. And there's nothing special about Cisco's. Now, compare Cisco to Microsoft. Now *There* is some vendor lock-in. One thing depends on another thing and another thing and another. To move off of Microsoft is mind-numbingly ridiculous to imagine. But Cisco? Nah. You can replace this and that here and there and you'll be just fine. Sure, you might have to migrate away from the use of anything Cisco proprietary here and there, but for the most part? You can take your time and move bits and pieces here and there.

That doesn't quite count if you're talking about Cisco phones... that's kind of an all or nothing scenario there... within limits. One thing is certain though -- Cisco needs to be humbled.

You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?

Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open source.

You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?

Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open s

If you look at what the competitors are offering, neither Oracle nor Cisco are worth what they are charging - except in very rare case where no one else is offering the type of very specialized feature that Oracle or Cisco has.

And to put it in yet another way - the price Oracle / Cisco charge or their products do not guarantee that shit won't happen - I know of cases where shits did happen when Oracle / Cisco are being employed - and no, I can't reveal the detail, for the

No. That's not true. It takes brain power. There's a wealth of information out there because pretty much, it has all been done before in one form or another.

It seems cheaper in the short run to buy something off the shelf and put it up. But when you keep paying for it over and over and over again, you might begin to realize that people are cheaper in the long run.

Besides that, do you think the likes of Google STARTED out with billions of dollars? How about Facebook and the others like them? They started with some pretty smart people which turned out to be a far better investment than paying for licensed off-the-shelf stuff.

You either pay for the brainpower upfront with pre-configured hardware/software, or make up the difference with smart (but expensive) people. The trick is which lasts longer, or is a better long-term investment.

I could employ a crappy IT admin who only knows windows, and pay him $40k and the enterprise Win suite and license seats for $20k total; or a decent linux admin at $60k and virtually unlimited server and seats running CentOS and Ubuntu for $0.

The most important difference is that while a mediocre admin will be able to keep a windows network limping along, it is likely to be extremely insecure and suffer from all manner of other problems.An expensive competent admin on the other hand will be able to do a much better job regardless of the technology they use, although it would be foolish to spend a lot on proprietary software when your admins are competent enough to do a better job using free software.

The real difference is that at the end of the year, with MS, you still have closed software being managed by a mediocre admin and are pretty much limited to what the vendor wrote in the software and what your admin can find on google.

With the second option, you've still spent $60k, but you started with a much higher level of base competence and things usually go up from there. At the end of the year you have many more options and much more flexibility in what you're capable of, IT wise and business wise, with that higher level of competence.

The logic of this argument is quite common here on Slashdot, and that logic always escapes me. Everybody seems to acknowledge that a talented Linux sysadmin costs more than a mediocre Windows sysadmin. What I fail to understand is why a business is only presented with those two options. In reality, a business cares about money first and foremost. And the cost of your salary is usually quite a bit more than the cost difference between Windows Server and Red Hat Server. The reality is that a business is going to choose between a talented Linux sysadmin and a talented Windows admin (because they're willing to pay for talent) or they're going to choose between a mediocre Linux admin and a mediocre Windows admin (because they're not).

Slashdot seems to think there's no such thing as a talented Windows administrator. That's complete and utter bullshit. The concepts of administering Linux are not significantly different than those for administering Windows. I would go so far as to say that if you're unable to secure and manage a Windows network, you shouldn't be a sysadmin at all on any operating system. Windows is easy to administer. You read and reference the Resource Kit [microsoft.com], research and follow best practice, and you will be absolutely fine. Just like on Linux. If you cannot do these things as a sysadmin, please quit your job. You're making the rest of us look bad.

The argument is like saying, "well, the average COBOL programmer costs quite a bit more than the average C programmer... clearly we should go where the talent is and program in COBOL!"

I also find it completely baffling that Slashdot seems to think that because you go with Linux, the business software you're going to run will use open source, too. More than that, that just because you hired a talented sysadmin you also hired a talented software developer. In my experience, sysadmins make horrible software developers because they do not develop robust solutions that adhere to development best practice. You end up with buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable software that may or may not function correctly. Similarly, software developers make horrible sysadmins, because they constantly do things that make their system work and compromise the integrity of everything else. You end up buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable computer systems that may or may not function correctly. The mindsets required to properly do software development and system administration are entirely different, and to do anything well requires focus and dedication. I would not look for the same talent in the same person any more than I would look for a writer to also be an editor, or an actor to also be a musician. Yes, it can be done, but generally it is the exceptions that prove the rule. Once a person chooses one path, they seldom cross to the other again.

While I agree that there are talented Windows administrators just as there are talented Linux administrators the rest of that paragraph is nonsense. The concepts differ significantly between the two operating systems once you look further than the "OS manages hardware resources and provide services" part. And you will not be fine one a more than trivial setup by just reading the books and following best practices. In fact, in my opinion that is one of the things that makes the difference between a mediocre

Talented windows sysadmins are no cheaper than talented linux sysadmins, but you still have the added cost of windows and all the other proprietary third party software it requires...And while competent admins will be able to scale up to many hosts quite easily, software costs just escalate as you add more hosts.Also a competent windows admin will spend a lot of time trying to mitigate serious windows design flaws...

Following best practices generally does not work, or is not practical... I have pentested ma

CIO's and other high level executives didn't get to where they are by taking big risks. They are generally very conservative and play it by the book. When the time comes to make a big decision like infrastructure or database or enterprise software they are not going to make that decision unilaterally, even if they are perfectly capable of making it themselves. They are going to bring in "experts", the ones you refer to as high paid consultants, and have them conduct studies and analysis and come up with a r

They wanted a router which could handle both a T1 (so a slow legacy software router with obsolete interfaces) and a fiber (most likely 1Gbps ethernet). The 3945 is not a particularly stupid choice if those are the requirements and you like Cisco.

Now, split those requirements in two, and you can use a) any old T1 router and b) a random 1Gbps ethernet CPE. a) costs practically nothing refurbished. If you go with Cisco and you're a government agency, you can probably get an ME3400 with advanced license for und

Try keeping stray RF/ESD/etc out of TOSLINK transceivers, even Toshiba brand is crap. Yes it's plastic fiber but this crap can't do 1 mbaud. It struggles at 125k baud. So for our unfortunate application we had to redesign the item with shielding. The original receiver/transmitter pair were shielded but they cost reduced them. I can't see how they can transmit audio much less other data.The other problem with plastic is it will transmit RF/ESD into the transceivers if it's not exactly perfect and moisture fr

The idea that American schools don't have enough money is absurd. America spends more per capita on its schools than any other nation in the world.

Now, that all that money is not correctly distributed among schools is clear too. And far more important than that, all the money in the world doesn't matter if mommy and daddy don't encourage and take part in junior's education. Which in makes marginal investments in failing schools pointless, because it's the entire environment of the district that's failing

TVs? Clearly, I went to school in the wrong decade. I can remember when my Alma Mater [slashdot.org] got telephones. (Truth is, they were late to the game, and only installed telephones in response to an instance of rape, where the attacker broke into the dorm room after protracted effort. Thankfully, he also went to jail.)

Because I was too cheap to buy a TV while at college, I lost the habit of nightly TV viewing. Though I own a secondhand set now, I can't recall the last time I turned it on.

Mommy and daddy don't have a clear understanding about money or economics any more than congresscritters or teachers do. If they did, they'd teach their children that formal and informal educations combined are the only way they'll really have a successful future beyond a "pawn's mate".

There are multi-level failures within the American education system. It starts with parents ultimately not understanding how to really help their children succeed and it is further exacerbated by poor management of money

I'll agree that support of learning by the family is significant. Not *quite* essential, given an optimal for learning school environment, but even then significant. (And no school in the country, in the world as far as I know, offers an optimal for learning environment. It requires 1-3 teachers/child, e.g. [and not even always the same 1-3 teachers.])

OTOH, my wife teaches music and art in her studio, and she reports that children whose mothers don't go to work tend to have children that are about twice

huh! That's even less than your source says we spend on the military, which initially surprised me. But, my first question was: Did they account for spending by the states in their estimate? Further, in trying to sort out the source for the data, the site seemed to repeatedly cite itself in an orobouros-like fashion. Do you have another source?

huh! That's even less than your source says we spend on the military, which initially surprised me. But, my first question was: Did they account for spending by the states in their estimate? Further, in trying to sort out the source for the data, the site seemed to repeatedly cite itself in an orobouros-like fashion. Do you have another source?

I wouldn't rely on nationmaster.com for reliable, up-to-date information. That data is from 1998 and converted into US dollars based on 2001 PPP measurements. I would not say that is the most reliable source of information on the current state of education spending. According to that Thailand is outspending countries like South Korea, Singapore and Belgium on education..

Hilarious. I recall, for the brief time I was studying CS, two students employed in one of the CS labs expounding, respectively, on the virtues of FORTH and LISP. Sorry that I don't have a mod point to toss your way right now.

This is a typically American problem - the notion that you can simply throw money at problems and they will go away. The war on poverty has met the same fate. We have essentially the same proportion of people below the poverty line today as we did in LBJ's time despite spending massive amounts of money on it.

If you are a teacher where would you rather work? In a nice, safe suburban school or a dangerous underfunded urban school? The fact that the suburban school also has more money only exacerbates the prob

99%? Doubtful.. But hefty discounts indeed, and Oracle is still obscenely expensive

Not doubtful at all--documented when they were sued by government agencies for violating contract terms that required the best price be given. I can't remember if it was 95% or 99%, but it was huge. In essence, if they want your business badly enough, they'll only charge you a tiny fraction of the "list" price. Then of course they will proceed to ream you on maintenance renewals...

Same with Cisco. The real profit for Cisco is in SmartNet maitenance fees, 22.5% each and every year you own the box. HP sells lifetime maintenance with their boxes. Huge difference in lifecycle costs. If you are buying generic switches and routers for the comm closet HP is the way to go. Only use the fancy boxes from Cisco/Juniper at the boundary and maybe in the network core where the fancy stuff MIGHT be needed.

They're doing this because Mark Benioff is Larry Ellison's ex-protoge, and their relationship took a turn for the worse and now they're in a gigantic dick measuring contest. Goes something along the lines of this-

It all depends on who you are. At my last company, the local Cisco account team wanted us as a reference account. Our discount from Cisco (before distribution and the partner took their cut) was 59%. Our final discount was 55% or 57% (depending on whether we went through disti or direct from Cisco).

At my current company, our discount from Cisco (again before disti and partner) is 55%. Our price after partner and disti is 47% (yes, our partner is taking a ridiculous cut).

From the sound of the Alcatel, it makes me wonder if they come out of the same factory as LG switches. Upgraded the firmware on a dozen of them, and the uplink ports on two of them died, never to be revived. Uplink ports on a dozen others have failed or gotten flaky, and some of them drop downstream connections at random times. Sixty six switches, and over a dozen of them have failed fully or partially. Pretty horrible ratio.

From the look of it, it seems the bid required them to front-load 8 years of maintenance for software and hardware. Cisco usually wins bids by basically giving the hardware away, but charging full for their maintenance (Smartnet). By forcing them to front-load it for such a long time, they had no way to make money on the back-end, which is probably why it was so expensive.